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Ocado Group's new shareholders look a lot like their old ones. One-third of the shares sold in the online retailer's initial public offering last week were bought by two affiliates of asset manager Fidelity, according to regulatory filings.

Overall, at least half of the sale was taken up by existing investors, which include Fidelity, and regulatory filings show only one major new investor.

The IPO, which totalled £369m ($575.1m), had one of the worst debuts on the London Stock Exchange, even after the price was slashed below the initial price range because of a lack of demand. The shares, priced at 180 pence, ended at 165 pence on Thursday, down 8.3% from the issue price and 40% below the top of the initial price range, or 275 pence. Over the same period, the FTSE 250 Index of UK mid-cap stocks has risen 4.0%.

According to regulatory filings made by investors with holdings of more than 3%, Fidelity International Limited, a Bermuda-based asset manager, bought 28 million of the 205 million shares sold in the IPO. Fidelity Management & Research, its US affiliate, bought 37.7 million shares. Together, they bought 32% of the shares available for sale, a mix of new shares and some from existing shareholders, and own 13.2% of Ocado, according to those filings.

A Fidelity spokesman confirmed the size of the stakes but declined to comment further.

Fidelity first acquired a stake in Ocado, known for delivering groceries from Waitrose, in November 2009, according to the prospectus for the offering. Its investment came at the same time as one by Generation Investment Management, the asset manager run by former US vice-president Al Gore and ex-Goldman Sachs Asset Management chief executive David Blood. Generation acquired around 29 million shares in the Ocado IPO, or 14% of the available shares on offer.

Ocado said two other pre-IPO investors who increased their stakes are Jörn Rausing, son of the founder of packaging company Tetra Laval International, and private investor Nick Roditi, who used to work with hedge-fund manager George Soros.

Regulatory filings so far show only one new investor with a significant stake. Nomad Investment Partnership, a Cayman Islands-listed entity linked to two former analysts at Marathon Asset Management, owns a 3.5% stake in the company, having bought 19.5 million shares in the offering, or nearly 10% of the sale.

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A spokesman for Ocado confirmed Nomad hadn't invested in the company prior to the IPO. Nomad was unavailable for comment.

The IPO was sharply criticised by a number of analysts and fund managers, who said Ocado was vastly overvaluing itself and its growth prospects. The company hasn't made an annual operating profit since it launched 10 years ago.

A person close to Ocado said the company was happy with its share register because Nomad and Fidelity have a track record of taking large initial stakes in online retailers. Fidelity owned nearly 27% of the IPO of Internet company Google a month after it went public in 2004, according to a regulatory filing at the time. At the end of last week, Nomad held 7% in UK online clothing retailer ASOS, according to a separate regulatory filing.

UBS, one of the banks that handled the IPO, declined to comment. JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, which also played key roles in the offering, did not respond to requests for comment.